I may have stumbled upon his blog in the past, but my memory didn't click when I visited there this morning. I just spent about two hours "visiting" however, and I'm a little choked up, a little sad, and perhaps a little amazed. But I'm getting ahead of myself. (This entry isn't really "prepared". I'm witing as I think, and my thoughts are a jumble with a mixture of awe, grief, and friendship, and all for someone I didn't even "know" inasmuch as we can ever get to know someone on the internet.)

While I was answering comments this morning, one of the bloggers I read paid tribute to a blog and Xangan called "jstickmann". At first I thought she was saying he'd shut down his blog, like so many seem to do. I was writing my comment to her, and started to talk about how I hoped he would "come back" with another blog, a sort of generic answer, since I didn't know the Xangan. She supplied a link to his blog in her entry, so I clicked it. The blog belonged to John (jstickmann), an artist, photographer, and a poetic soul, who passed away yesterday. His brother, Greg, also a blogger on Xanga, had written a beautiful "last post" for his brother, explaining that John had been quite prolific of late, and he and John's nephews, also Xangans, could keep his artisitc legacy alive for quite some time by posting photos of art and his writings. More Here...

• The sparkle of a new relationship is always temporary.
• The fires of infatuation have to cool before mature love can grow and develop.
• Growing up with happily married parents doesn't guarantee that your own marriage will be good. Likewise, growing up in a broken family doesn't necessarily mean you won't have a good marriage.
• A successful marriage has much more to do with how you handle your current life than what happened in your past.